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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

E-N diverts blame for SCHIP failure

The San Antonio Express-News has another editorial out today that is a piece of work. It trys to make the case that the blame for Congress’ failure to pass an SCHIP extension should fall equally on both Republicans and Democrats.Nonsense.Nearly 80 percent of Americans support this legislation that a small minority of rightwing Republicans have been blocking. Democrats have already made many compromises in the legislation resulting in thousands of children being excluded from the program because their parents make too much money or because they are LEGAL immigrants. How many more children does the Express-News want to see kicked off of the program before they will concede that the Democrats have compromised enough?When you read the editorial, they spend 90 percent of it talking about how Republicans have failed to compromise. And yet the headline of the piece is “Both sides to blame for SCHIP gridlock”. What do they chide Democrats about? Not rescheduling the vote because a few Republican congressmen were going to miss it. Would rescheduling the vote have made any difference? Would these Republicans have come back and changed their votes if the Democrats had put it off longer? Not likely. It made no difference ultimately because they were still short the votes necessary to override Bush’s promised second veto. But this slim reed of criticism was good enough for the editorial board to lay blame equally on both sides. They have to be “fair and balanced” after all.What is really going on here is that while the editorial board nominally supports SCHIP, they are at heart a partisan Republican outfit that endorses Republican candidates almost exclusively across the board. So they are trying to bend over backwards to shield Republicans from the public’s justifiable anger on this issue and divert it unfairly onto the other side.